| START Conference Manager |
(Submission #123)
The numerous anthropogenic activities associated with the coast of Galicia, together with the annual maritime traffic of more than 40,000 ships in transit of which more than 14,000 carry substances or goods considered hazardous to the marine environment, suppose a potential risk of contamination of coastal areas. This fact has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout history, in which Galicia has suffered in their coasts very serious episodes of accidental marine pollution from ships of all kinds.
When planning the best strategies of response to accidental marine pollution, it is essential to have a whole picture of all the possible scenarios of a contingency. At the time of a crisis it is necessary to have the most detailed and updated information, and therefore to have a good metadata description. But it is also necessary that this information will be available in a quick and understandable way to speed up its management by the different actors involved in the response.
The visualization of data in maps is an essential element in providing an overview of a crisis, as well as the computerization of the maps. The Marine Contingency Plan of Galicia (Plan CAMGAL) counts on its own Common Operating Picture (COP). The COP is established and maintained by the gathering, collating, synthesizing, and disseminating of episode information to all appropriate parties involved in an incident. This information will help the environmental responders and decision makers to create interactive queries, to analyse the geospatial information, to edit the data and the maps and to present the results in the appropriate format for each user.
Since the data used during a crisis and displayed by the COP is generated by multiple agencies and institutions, the platforms needs to allow for interoperability with other data servers, i.e., they must ingest various data formats without major changes and, if possible, using transmission of the requests over the internet.
The creation of this application, based on the sharing of environmental spatial data between different organisations, benefits from the European INSPIRE initiative since this directive encourages the interchange of information and the interoperability between SDIs local, regional and national in an easy and natural way.
This tool is being developed in the frame of Mariner project (co-financed by the European Union in the framework of the Union Civil Protection Mechanism, DG-ECHO) that aims to improve the preparedness of coastal communities for marine contingencies involving hazard and noxious substances.
Topic Area: [1.7] Environmental and spatial impact assessment Abstract Type: Oral Presentation
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